5 Foods to Fuel Your Workout

FROM iVIL­LAGE

BananaBefore we begin, there’s one thing you need to know: The best food to eat before a work­out depends on when you’re going to eat it.

If you’re an early riser who goes to the gym on the way to work, you won’t have enough time between leav­ing home and arriv­ing at the gym to really digest a full break­fast. Your pre-workout snack is going to have to be really light. On the other hand, if you’re work­ing out in the mid­dle of the after­noon, your work­out is going to be fueled by your choices at lunch and you’ll have a cou­ple of hours to digest your food before hit­ting the gym. That means a dif­fer­ent pre-workout meal from the one you might choose if you were scroung­ing around the kitchen at 5:30 a.m. on the way to the track.

The closer to your work­out, the more you want to focus on eat­ing car­bo­hy­drates rather than fat or pro­tein. Car­bo­hy­drates are digested in the small intestines, whereas fat and pro­tein are bro­ken down in the stom­ach. This means cramp­ing and indi­ges­tion are more likely when you work out with a belly full of fat– or protein-rich foods.

The rule is this: The less time until the work­out, the less you should eat. This makes sense: It takes time to digest food, so you don’t want to scarf down a huge break­fast right before get­ting on the tread­mill. Those plan­ning to run the marathon on Sun­day usu­ally eat a huge din­ner on Sat­ur­day night. But those plan­ning to go for a three-mile jog at 5:30 a.m. may be fine with just an orange eaten about 20 min­utes before.

With that in mind, I’ve pre­pared a list of my five favorite all-around pre-workout snacks. These work just fine whether you’re an early-morning exer­ciser and need some­thing light or you’re about to head out for a work­out in the late after­noon and are just look­ing for a lit­tle extra energy to com­bat the 3 p.m. crash.

With a smear
This is one of my favorite snacks, period. I take some hearts of cel­ery and fill in the groove with some organic almond but­ter or peanut but­ter. This snack really trav­els well in Tup­per­ware and makes a ter­rific pre-workout snack. Why? The cel­ery has fiber and nutri­ents (includ­ing cal­cium and vit­a­min A) and a ridicu­lously low 6 calo­ries per medium stalk. The nut but­ter has pro­tein and fat. The over­all calo­ries are low, and this really fills you up with­out slow­ing you down, pro­vid­ing great “slow-release” energy for a ter­rific workout.

The dou­ble A
Sim­ply put, an apple with almonds. The apple is the per­fect food for a pre-exercise snack. The sugar load is mod­er­ate, it con­tains valu­able pectin fiber which slows the entrance of that sugar into the blood­stream, and it’s a nutri­tional pow­er­house con­tain­ing vit­a­mins, min­er­als and antiox­i­dants. Com­bine it with about a dozen almonds, which add some fat and pro­tein. They’ll fur­ther slow the entrance of the sugar into the blood­stream for sus­tained energy and keep hunger away.

Whey to go
Whey pro­tein is my favorite kind of pro­tein pow­der. Not only is it extremely high-quality, bioavail­able pro­tein; it sup­ports the immune sys­tem by pro­vid­ing the build­ing blocks for glu­tathione, arguably the body’s most impor­tant antiox­i­dant. And stud­ies indi­cate that whey pro­tein may boost weight loss efforts. Accord­ing to one French study, eat­ing whey before exer­cise sup­ports fat burn­ing and may help with gain­ing or main­tain­ing lean body mass. I sug­gest a whey pro­tein shake made with either water alone or with frozen berries. The berries add fiber, nutri­ents and some extra car­bo­hy­drates, and make for a more deli­cious drink.

Berry cheesy
Here’s a tid­bit of info that you might enjoy: In my book The 150 Health­i­est Foods on the Planet, I asked 16 nutri­tion experts to con­tribute lists of their 10 favorite healthy foods. Berries, espe­cially blue­ber­ries, made the list of more experts than any other food. Berries are loaded with phy­tonu­tri­ents, antiox­i­dants and fiber, and are low in sugar. Mix a bowl of berries with a piece of string cheese for the per­fect pre-workout snack. The string cheese has 8 grams of pro­tein, some fat to keep hunger at bay and only about 80 calo­ries. And it’s an excel­lent source of calcium.

TG: too good
The ini­tials of this snack stand for turkey and grapes. It’s a per­fect match of pro­tein, carbs and low calo­ries to take the edge off your hunger and prime your exer­cise pump. Four small slices of deli-packaged turkey con­tain only 87 calo­ries but give you more than 14 grams of pro­tein, plus some of the cancer-fighting min­eral sele­nium to boot. A cup of grapes adds some carbs to the mix together with phy­to­chem­i­cals. Go for fresh turkey when­ever pos­si­ble as the pack­aged kind is high in sodium, and choose red or pur­ple grapes because they have more antioxidants.

Obvi­ously there are other choices besides my five favorites. In a pinch, I’ll use a pro­tein bar, though you’ll want to watch the sugar con­tent and look out for the pres­ence of trans-fatty acids. One of my favorites is Atkins Advan­tage, though there are oth­ers you may like as well. Hard-boiled eggs are another secret weapon in the search for portable pro­tein that com­bines nicely with a lit­tle fruit (such as an apple).

Remem­ber: What you eat after the work­out is even more impor­tant than what you eat before it. That’s when your mus­cles are hun­gry and your depleted glyco­gen (mus­cle sugar) stores need replac­ing. The “golden hour” after the work­out is the time when those mus­cles soak up nutri­ents most effec­tively. Choose what you eat after the work­out with just as much care as you choose that pre-workout snack.

Reviewed by Ger­a­lyn Coop­er­smith, M.A., CSCS

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